K atie c ouric

Get Specific
We live in the information age, which makes granular targeting more
important than ever before. There’s a lot of competition—with a myriad of
products, messages, and content, people have an incredible number of
options. Consumers and fans have become much more specific in their
interests, and there’s a plethora of niche audiences. Use this fact to your
advantage.
If you could take a time machine to the 1970s and stop ten people on the
street to ask them their top ten favorite songs, most of those people would
share around five or six of the same songs. People had limited choice of
music back then because there was less music being produced and fewer
distribution outlets for that music (i.e., only radio and TV).
If you were to conduct the same survey today, there’s no way you’d
have as much overlap. There are more songs available, more music
distribution outlets, including self-distribution platforms (e.g., Facebook,
iTunes, and Spotify), and more direct access to the artists themselves than
ever before. The level of content, information, and products in the
marketplace has significantly increased, fragmenting people’s interests into
specific niche areas.
This truth applies to many industries. Just look at what’s happened to
television since the creation of streaming services like Netflix, Amazon
Prime, and Hulu. There are more options and styles of shows than ever
before. There’s an audience for almost any genre—you just need to know
how to find it.
With Facebook and other online advertising tools, you can target very
specific audiences for your brand. For example, you can target college
graduates that make $75,000 a year, who live in Chicago, Illinois, who are
married and love dogs. Before the internet, it was much harder (if not

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impossible) to reach a vast number of people in such a specific group.
Using Facebook’s targeting features creates an opportunity to figure out
exactly who will buy your product and to design your content and strategy
specifically to meet their needs, which in turn allows you to be more cost
efficient and increase your profitability.
I personally benefited from Facebook’s ad platform by using it to target
audiences to help me choose the title and the cover of this book. My team
tested the creative artwork against different audiences that taught us not just
which book cover (down to the specific color) works best but also with
which audiences it most resonates. We tested the cover of this book against
“entrepreneurs,” “small business owners,” “people that read publications
such as TechCrunch, 
Wired
, and 
Fast Company
.” This information helped
us understand who would be most interested in the book and which
marketing messages are most appealing to them.